Email schemail

It’s 4pm and you haven’t got a single thing done from your to do list (which has also managed to expand to double it’s original size since this morning), and you resign yourself to another late night at the Horroffice because there’s that one thing that you absolutely have to get sorted before you can go home.

We’ve all been there (far too often, sadly). It sucks. Literally and metaphorically. It drains the lifeblood from you, leaving you physically exhausted, and it sucks away any shred of enthusiasm you might have had left.

But what can you do about it? How can you make things better?

It might not be the answer to all your problems, but here’s something worth trying.

When you get in, don’t log in to your email, at least for the first hour.

It’s hard to actually do this. We’ve become conditioned into checking our emails every five minutes at work, and even checking them on our mobile when we’re away from the office.

But here’s why you should give it a go. The first thing everyone does in the morning is check their email. And often that throws the whole day, because there’s something on there you need to sort, and you start working on that. Your own priorities and projects go out of the window. And then you’re on your usual roller-coaster day, dealing with whatever is thrown your way.

But if you don’t check email for that first hour, and if you know exactly what you need to or want to work on for that hour, you can spend that time on the most urgent or important thing in your day and you’ll get a lot achieved before anyone comes calling for your attention.

Why? Because everyone else will still be busy dealing with their email box.

It might not clear everything down, but at least when you hit 4pm, you’ll have one thing knocked off your list, and you might be able to leave on time for a change.

Worth a try, surely?

Comments ( 4 )

Brilliant idea! you're right, some days it can be nearly lunchtime before I've finished 'fire-fighting' from the fall out of that day's emails.
I used to work for a man who never looked at his emails before lunchtime. He said if it was urgent, people would telephone him!
Thanks for the tip.